


Wrecking Ball

by Mertiya



Series: Story Circle [22]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Fiora - Freeform, Gen, Gender Issues, Genderfluid Character, Maybe a teeny bit shippy if you squint, gatewatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 10:12:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10511670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: The Gatewatch is invited to a Fioran ball.  Liliana is supercilious.  Jace is annoyed.





	

Jace gave a sigh of relief as he collapsed onto the bed. It wasn’t the most comfortable bed he’d ever lain on, but frankly he would have taken a board at this point, if it had meant getting the weight off his feet. He’d been running around all day, helping the rest of the Gatewatch thwart an interplanar assassin, and now all he wanted to do was sleep so he could get back to Ravnica and listen to only a five minute lecture from Lavinia as opposed to an hour-long one. Not to mention the inevitable one from Ral Zarek, which always made him feel about three feet high.

            “You all right?” Gideon asked solicitously, and Jace managed a smile and a tired nod.

            “I just need to sleep for about a week,” he yawned, curling up around the nearest pillow.

            Of course, as soon as he’d nearly gotten comfortable, there was a knock on the door. Jace groaned.

            “I’ll get it,” Gideon offered, and Jace declined to have a politeness showdown with him.

            “Be my guest,” he mumbled into his pillow.

            He heard Gideon moving towards the door, then a pause as someone on the other side spoke in a low, murmuring voice. “Ah—thank you, your invitation is very kind,” Gideon said haltingly. Oh, no.

            “I don’t want to go to a thing,” Jace said into his pillow.

            “Yes, we will be attending, of course. Thank you very much.”

            Jace threw his pillow at Gideon’s head.

            “What?” Gideon asked.

            “What was that?” Jace asked, rolling up on his elbow. “Because to me it sounded as if you agreed that we would do something else before leaving.”

            Gideon made an awkward expression. “They—er—the queen has sent an invitation for us to attend a ball as thanks for our services.”

            “And you agreed.”

            “It seemed only polite.”

            Jace wanted to argue, but as he was pretty sure he would have responded in exactly the same way if he’d answered the door, he just sighed and tried to turn back to the pillow. Which he had thrown across the room. “Gideon, could you—”

            The pillow thudded into his head and Jace looked up, startled. Gideon gave him a brief grin. “What? I’m not serious _all_ the time.”

            Muttering something incomprehensible, Jace pulled his cloak around him and went to sleep.

~

            Thankfully, Fiora was one of the planes on which it was possible to obtain a passable imitation of a cup of coffee, which meant that the following morning, Jace was actually capable of waking up at a reasonable hour, although he resigned himself to the fact that it was going to be an uncomfortable day for several reasons, at least one of which it was better to try hard not to think about.

            Once he’d secured his coffee, Jace looked around. He was in the dining hall of the inn they were staying at, which had a number of long wooden tables set up for the benefit of the patrons. The rest of the Gatewatch had already collected at one of the tables near the door, and were chatting with one another in various stages of awakeness. At the wakeful end of the spectrum, Gideon sat ramrod straight, eating his way through a pile of eggs that would have put a loxodon to shame. Liliana, less alert but still looking every inch put together, sat across from him with her own cup of coffee. Somehow she had managed to do her hair before breakfast, simply, but in a way that framed her face and, of course, drew one’s attention subtly to her cleavage. Jace frowned, tugging nervously at his cloak, and feeling abruptly small and grubby and ugly.

            Looking over at Nissa wasn’t much help. She drooped a little from sleep, but she still managed a vague air of ethereal loveliness. There was a small, decorative plant on the table, and she had pulled it near her and was apparently coaxing it to grow.

            At least Chandra was a mess, Jace thought, a little vindictively. The pyromancer was even worse in the mornings than Jace himself. Right now she was practically faceplanting into a stack of pancakes, and it was unclear whether she was trying to inhale them or whether she’d fallen back asleep. Her hair stuck out every which way, and there were traces of syrup smudged across the back of her hand.

            As Jace approached the table, he heard Liliana speaking in her most supercilious voice. “A ball? How nice of them to ask. Of course I’ll be going. _Someone_ has to hold up our reputation.”

            Chandra sat back, rolling her eyes to high heaven. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            “Just, my dear, that we ought to at least have _one_ proper lady on the team.”

            Jace felt the bottom of his stomach roiling hard, a flush rising on his cheeks, and a quick flash of bright anger that wasn’t entirely on behalf of Chandra and Nissa. A decision he hadn’t been at all sure he was ready to make coalesced suddenly in the pit of his stomach.

            “Nissa,” he said quietly as he made his way over to the Gatewatch, and his friend looked up at him, one finger still outstretched and coaxing the plant upwards. “I wonder if you could help me with something.”

~

            Parties. Chandra could never decide whether she liked them or hated them. On the one hand, lots of great food. On the other, lots of annoying people talking about things she probably didn’t know or care about. And a bunch of etiquette she didn’t understand and wasn’t going to bother with, but it did get kind of annoying the way people stared at her all the time for using the wrong fork to eat the cake with or whatever.

            At least they’d mostly stopped staring at her outfit by now. Apparently it was unusual for women to wear trousers to this kind of fancy-dress gathering, but Chandra wasn’t going to stuff herself into a dress for anyone if she didn’t feel like it, so instead she’d managed to get hold of a secondhand but vaguely elegant man’s uniform. It didn’t quite fit—stretching a bit too much over the chest and hips—but it was pretty comfortable, and she thought it actually looked kind of nice. Or she had, when she’d tried it on in the shop. She wasn’t so sure anymore, after the number of whispers and titters she’d gotten.

            Gideon, being Mr. Perfect, had of course told her, “you look lovely,” with complete sincerity, and Chandra had muttered an awkward thank you. He was the only one. Chandra didn’t particularly care whether she looked nice, but it was getting a little annoying the way everyone was studiedly avoiding the subject. Especially since everyone had made a point of telling Liliana that she was gorgeous, beautiful, lovely, etc, etc; Chandra had heard enough adjectives in the same vein that she could probably write a thesaurus entry at this point. And wasn’t it a little tacky to say that to Lili while she was standing right next to Chandra, as if Chandra wasn’t even there?

            To Liliana’s credit, she’d been very gracious. She was clearly preening under all the attention, but she did try to steer everyone to talk to Chandra as well. Of course, Chandra didn’t _want_ to talk to anyone, so she was trying to make sure she constantly had something in her mouth—at least it was great food—and counting the minutes until they could leave and she could grab Nissa and maybe get some alone time with her. It was probably going to be a while, though, since Nissa hadn’t even showed up at the party yet.

            There was a sudden hush spreading from the crowd behind them, and Chandra felt herself relaxing as Nissa’s rare laugh carried from the doorway. “Who’s _that_ woman?” someone asked, and Chandra swallowed hastily so that she could say proudly, “That’s my girlfriend.”

            “Which one?” someone else asked, and Chandra turned hastily with some confusion, and, it had to be admitted, a tiny twinge of jealousy. Who was Nissa with? She’d disappeared off somewhere earlier with some excuse that Chandra had been too sleepy to process properly.

            Nissa had just entered the room with another young woman whom Chandra didn’t recognize but felt that she ought to. In confusion, her eyes traveled up the long blue dress, loose in the knees but tight around the hips, to the extremely well-filled-out halter top studied with pale gems in a faint semicircular shape, up to a pair of pale shoulders and a slightly abashed face surrounded by short dark hair—when Chandra’s brain finally processed the light blue tattoos marking the chin and cheek of the woman she was trying not to ogle too hard, she dropped her glass.

 

 

~

            Jace took a deep breath.

            “Go on,” Nissa said in a quiet but encouraging voice. “You can do this.”

            “Um.” Jace swallowed. Her voice had come out as a tiny squeak and, if she wanted the Gatewatch to be able to hear her, it needed to be louder. Guildpact voice, she told herself a little shakily. Guildpact voice. The next attempt was significantly louder, and sounded barely higher than her normal register; it was too difficult to concentrate on the visual and tactile aspects of the illusion and put too much into the voice as well.

            “Good evening,” she said. “Ehm—my name is Jace Beleren, I’m one of the guests tonight. Some of you—” Oh, dear god. As she scanned the crowd, Jace had caught sight of Chandra, whose mouth was open and whose eyes were apparently fixed on Jace’s breasts. Well, then the halter top probably looked fine. Chandra wasn’t exactly subtle about it when she had—aesthetic appreciation for someone. Aaaand that was an awkward thought, because even if Chandra and Nissa hadn’t been dating, Jace’s feelings towards Chandra were pretty much on the level of how she thought she would have felt about a younger sister if she had one. If she remembered having one, she amended. “—you might not be used to seeing me like this. Er, sometimes I’m a woman. Thanks.” She’d had a bit of a longer speech prepared earlier in the day, but it had deserted her. When she saw the frozen mask Liliana was using to regard her, she was somewhat glad she’d kept it short. Well, she hadn’t been trying to get a _positive_ emotion out of Liliana, anyway.

            Nissa had reacted favorably to Jace’s earlier explanation, which the mind mage was aware had probably been a little garbled. It wasn’t something she really let herself think about a lot, and it was only really a problem on sporadic occasions. Most of the time, she felt like a man, but sometimes, like now—she didn’t. She’d been toying with letting the rest of the Gatewatch know for several weeks at this point, but had still not been entirely sure she wanted to—until this morning, when Liliana had been so damn dismissive.

            Jace’s feelings about Liliana were complicated. She spent a lot of time reminding herself Liliana was bad for her, but—it was easy to fall back into old habits. Liliana made it easy, and that frightened Jace more than anything else about her current situation with the Gatewatch. Maybe she hoped that if Liliana saw her like this and was nasty about it, it would kick her emotions to follow with what the rest of her was trying to tell herself—that Liliana was Bad News. Although Liliana had been nasty about plenty of things in the past, and Jace’s emotions still sometimes went wildly out of control. At the very least, though, she didn’t want Liliana to have everything her own way this evening.

            After several long minutes of mingling and receiving an overwhelming number of compliments on her appearance—as well as a few more pointed thoughts delivered in her direction, which made her uncomfortably aware that, whatever she felt like, she rarely dressed in a way that drew that particular kind of attention in her direction—she headed over embarrassedly to where Chandra was carrying on an animated conversation with what a brief mental scan told her was one of the city’s most prominent lawyers. He was apparently rather taken with Chandra’s utter disregard for appearances.

            “Hiya, Jace, nice tits.”

            Jace felt her mouth open and close again. “Uh,” she said. “How much have you had to drink?”

            “I’m mostly teasing you.” Chandra grinned wickedly. “Okay, I’ve had a couple of glasses, but still. I’m not lying, though, they are nice. Not as nice as Nissa’s, but—”

            “Thank you, that’s more than I needed to know.” Jace held up a hand. That was more than enough information. It occurred to her that the large quantities of free alcohol at the party might be responsible for how difficult it was for her to strengthen her mental shields enough to block out the thoughts and emotions of the other guests. “So you don’t, um, mind?”

            “I guess it’s a little weird?” Chandra hazarded. “I don’t have a great metric for weird anyway, I like seeing boobs, and I _especially_ like seeing Liliana mad.”

            “So Liliana is—”

            Chandra nodded in Jace’s ex-girlfriend’s general direction, and Jace let her eyes follow the gesture. Liliana was hunched against the wall, glaring murderously at her drink. Jace was sure she would be perfectly charming if anyone approached her, but then Jace also suspected nobody would. Not when she looked that scary.

            Jace couldn’t suppress a somewhat vindictive grin herself. “So I look good?”

            “You do. Is this where you and Nissa snuck off to?”

            “Yeah.” Jace let an overeager waiter press a drink into her hand and promised herself she would drink it slowly and only have one. Lavinia’s disapproving face swam in her mind, suddenly and jarringly followed by the confused smirk she’d expect to see Ral make over this whole situation. “Being a mind mage does come in handy when it comes to making yourself look desirable, as it turns out.” Her smile turned mischievous. “And I may have stolen a few tips from Liliana herself.”

            Chandra choked on her own drink. “Oh my _god_.”

            Next question. Jace had been scanning the crowd for the past few minutes, but still hadn’t seen—“Do you know what happened to Gideon?”

            “I think he’s outside. When you came through the door, he downed four glasses of ice water and then practically ran for it. Pretty sure that’s one of the reason’s Lili’s looking so murderous. She’s been trying to put the moves on him for weeks, I swear.”

            Liliana was trying to seduce Gideon? Jace’s alcohol suddenly tasted like bitter grapes. She hadn’t noticed—but would she? And how much of the unpleasant feeling rolling around in her stomach right now was reasonable concern—how much of it was _un_ reasonable jealousy?

            “I’d better go find him,” she said. “Chandra—thanks for—well—not minding.”

            “Sure. Thanks for upsetting Liliana, it’s made this whole evening way more bearable.”

~

            Jace found Gideon standing outside, a fifth cup of what Jace presumed was ice water in one hand. He appeared to be regarding the view of the bright city skyline against the darkness of the night sky. Jace hovered for a few seconds, then finally cleared her throat. Gideon turned and gave her his best reassuring smile, but if she was being honest, she wasn’t entirely reassured.

            “Can I talk to you?”

            Gideon nodded, moving aside to make room for her, and Jace hesitantly joined him at the railing. From here, she could see there was also a rather nice view of the gardens surrounding the palace where the ball was taking place. For several minutes, the two of them stood and stared across the shadowy lawn, while Jace wrestled with her conscience and finally managed to force herself _not_ to read her friend’s mind.

            “So, are you—do you think I’m—” Jace swallowed, a sudden flash of memory thrown up from somewhere in the depths of her brain, without context, just an angry voice or the echo of a voice, _There’s the freak_. “Do—do you think I’m a freak?” It was hard for her to finish the sentence.

            Gideon turned to her immediately. “Gods, no.”

            “Then why did you—um—leave so suddenly?”

            Looking very serious, Gideon reached out a hand as if to touch Jace, then stopped himself, probably remembering that Jace’s reactions to being touched weren’t always favorable. “Two reasons. First of all, I thought it would annoy Liliana.”

            “Chandra thinks Liliana is flirting with you,” Jace admitted softly. Once again, she wasn’t quite sure why that thought bothered her, and simultaneously it bothered her that it did. Recursive layers of self-recrimination: the perfect touch to an already alarming evening.

            “She might be. I’m not particularly interested in whatever she has to offer.”

            Jace felt her eyes sliding away, guilt rising sudden in her chest. No, Gideon wouldn’t be interested in what Liliana had to offer—what did that say about Jace? She didn’t want to think about it. “What was the other reason?”

            “Ah, yes, that.” The hesitancy in Gideon’s voice was palpable, and Jace couldn’t help herself—she peeked. Not enough to see the full thought, but enough to catch a glimpse of embarrassment and some warmer and more complicated bundle of emotions. The fact that it wasn’t wholly negative was encouraging, as was the absence of a feeling of repulsion, and she managed to force herself to stay quiet and wait until Gideon spoke again.

            “I’m not attracted to men.” Gideon had stopped looking at her and was now staring at something in the middle distance—possibly a very interesting tree. “I don’t have a problem with men being attracted to me, you understand, but it’s not something I would reciprocate, or something that I particularly feel or understand.”

            Jace felt as if she’d rather lost the thread of the conversation. “All right?”

            “I’m used to you being a man,” Gideon explained. “And I’m not attracted to you.”

            Jace would have liked to say that the feeling was mutual, but she wasn’t certain she felt right about lying to Gideon right now. Besides, it would be an obvious lie. Everyone in the world was probably attracted to Gideon, even people who weren’t attracted to men. Certainly most everyone had the same thought upon first seeing Gideon, to a greater or lesser degree. Jace was in a position to know. “Mm,” she said, nodding seriously.

            “But then you came into the room, and I didn’t recognize you for a moment, and then, well—” Gideon rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “I’m trying to parse being attracted to someone who looks almost exactly like a man I know, but with features that are just slightly—well, feminine. Just enough to suddenly be, um, attractive. Gods, I sound like an asshole. It’s not you being a man or a woman or both—it’s just the sudden reversal.”

            The _or both_ rang rather comfortably in Jace’s head. Maybe not both at once, but maybe a function describing the oscillation—she filed that thought away for later discussion with Ral. Then she thought—really thought—about what Gideon had been saying.

            “So you _are_ attracted to me. Currently.”

            “Well,” Gideon admitted. “Yes, actually.”

            “Okay.” Admittedly, that was sort of—awkward. Flattering, at one level, Jace supposed, but also awkward, probably with a capital A. Jace knew how to handle being attracted to people who weren’t attracted back. She wasn’t certain how to handle the current situation.

            Gideon sighed. “I can’t tell you whether it will go away when you’re not—well—or not. But it doesn’t need to change anything.” A soft look passed over his face. “I’ve had practice working with people I’m attracted to in the Gatewatch already.”

            Jace caught a flicker of flame going through Gideon’s head, which died just as quickly. “That, um, that might be best,” she hedged.

            “Yes,” Gideon agreed, still staring at the tree, and Jace found herself compelled to rest an awkward hand on his elbow.

            “But, um, thanks,” she said. “For—this. For—”

            “Jace, you’re you, however you want to be you.” Gideon gave her a gentle smile. “Do you want to go back in? I’d like to get a chance to see Liliana’s reaction. Oh, and for the record—you look lovely.”

            Jace found herself smiling. “Thanks,” she mumbled. “Yeah. Let’s go back in, then. And maybe you could say something to Chandra about staring at my breasts.”

            Gideon laughed at that, whole, hearty, unrestrained, in a way that made Jace feel significantly better. As they two of them made their way back towards the ballroom, she smiled to herself. All told, things could have gone much worse.

**Author's Note:**

> Art by me :)


End file.
